The Trendsetting Paradox: The Dice Have no Memory
Today (June 30th, 2023) is the one year anniversary of my father’s death. Instead of sitting around dwelling on loss and missing my old man, I decided to post a blog piece I actually started writing over a year ago while he was ill and never finished. I simply forgot about it and only found it by accident on my phone a few days ago. As I read it I even had to check to see if I posted it already. I had not. I went through and fixed what grammar I could, but it was obviously tapped out on my iPhone, so PLEASE keep that in mind if you find any typos or bad grammar.
The Trendsetting Paradox: The Dice Have no Memory
“The dice have no memory.” Dice don’t understand statistics or probability, nor do they feel inclined to roll up in any certain streak for you. That is the underlying truth of all gambling. The idea that a trend in a game of chance is due to end because of the odds is referred to as the Monte Carlo Fallacy or the Gambler’s Fallacy. This is based on black hitting twenty-six times in a row on a roulette wheel at the Monte Carlo Casino in 1913. Gamblers believed red “was due” and lost millions of dollars at the wheel.
So I am posing the question (and answering it): is it better for a small business to set trends or follow trends? My thesis is that it’s actually better to follow trends than set them and I have a strong argument for that, which is likely to be ignored.
Research. Trendsetters pour tons and tons of money into researching the trend they are setting, so profits are reduced because so much money went out in the beginning to create the trend and decide how best to attract people and make them enjoy it that another business can observe exactly what the trendsetter did and copy it easier than building it. A great example is McDonald’s. Look at the health department scores for any town. With a very limited number of one-offs, chain restaurants will have better health scores listed than single-owner restaurants. With that, my friend Don was known as “Mr. 99” because of one problem what would have been costly to fix in his restaurant causing him to lose one percentage point in his otherwise flawless sanitation policy. The fix would have required a jackhammer to the floor and some new lines for a pop machine. The issue wasn’t a problem and his knowledge of the issue allowed him to vigilantly mitigate any issues that may arise from it, so all it did was cost him a single point on paper and was still one of the cleanest in town. I digress. McDonald’s has billions to spend on sanitation research. That mom and pop you frequent has like an extra $20. The mom and pop is paying for their son’s college or their daughter’s braces and being a single facility means there isn’t the large collective to pull funding from.
Profits. Nike makes awesome shoes. It costs them a fortune to do the R&D on the shoes and they charge north of $100 for a pair of sneakers, but their net profit is 4% to 6%. It may shock some readers that I could buy a pair of Nikes, send them to China to be torn apart, and have the company reverse-engineer something equal to (or better) for a retail price of $40 where I make a 20% to 40% net profit per item sold. I am going to say something very controversial next. An American designed product can be made in China by a manufacturer, bought here in the U.S., be sent back back to China as a prototype, built as good (or better) than the original, be sent back to the U.S., and sold in stores or drop shipped via online purchase all for a fraction of the price of the original product. How long would it take to have that up and running? A month. By doing that, you will not make the money that equates to the aggregate of the entire Nike annual profits, but you’ll make a lot more than you’re making today. Look at Walmart. Their shoes may not be name band, but they look familiar and they don’t cost that much, but they have a different brand label.
Risk. Let a trendsetter take on all the risk. If it’s an untapped market, let someone else tape that market and then follow. At the tattoo shop I was part of, I built the shop website and created a list of services. Trust me, I looked at other websites and pulled from them to build ours. The website would have cost $3,000 from a designer and $50 a month for service and hosting, plus another $500 per month for the constant photo updates we were doing. We updated our photos near constantly after a job. That’s $9,600 for the first year and $6,600 ahead after that. We paid $7 a month for hosting and $15 a year for the URL, so our cost was $100 a year, a savings of $9,000 in the first year. Let other businesses risk their money. Copy their efforts!
Costs. It’s cheaper. Imagine if you wanted to build a very unique house and hired an architect. They don’t work cheap. Now imagine your friend stops over and loves it. He snaps some photos and shows a contractor who can duplicate it for 20% less (like I said, architects aren’t cheap). The same is true in business. I can walk into any restaurant or bar in the country with a couple friends and take pictures all day long of how awesome the place is and duplicate those designs through a builder, or an interior designer, or by myself if it’s easy enough. (This is an example which I am not personally qualified to do, but is used for the example.)
Ease. It’s easy to copy someone else’s work. A business owner can see the costs and figure out how to cut them before implementing any ideas. Look at Texas Corral and Longhorn Steakhouse. I have no idea which one came first and its unimportant because both properties have the same trashy atmosphere the customers love; the corporate roadhouse feel. Whomever came second can easily just copy everything from the trendsetter because the work has already been done. It’s like copying someone’s math homework and not just the answers.
Every introductory college marketing class talks about paradigm shifts. What they never discuss is the cost associated with that paradigm shift. To change a person’s views on anything is expensive and time-consuming. Let someone else do that work for you.
So what is a trend and why is it bad to try setting one? A trend is a streak, like poker, that people tend to bet on or against. “Trend” is defined as “a general direction in which something is developing or growing.” I worked for a hotel restaurant in La Porte, Indiana. It’s not a trendy place. In fact, the one trend we have is to not be trendy. In the food service spectrum, it’s a Midwest meat and potatoes place. The owners of the hotel wanted to take out the wall between the bar and restaurant to make more like a nightclub that served food. Their reasoning was: it works in Detroit. First, in Indiana a restaurant can have a bar but the bar area has to be accessible only to persons 21 and over, so no children would then be allowed to enter the food service area (this law changes / changed July 1, 2023). Just because a trend works elsewhere doesn’t mean it will work where you want it to. They then leased the restaurant to a Chinese businessman who owned other restaurants and his nephew talked him into turning it into an Amer-Asian fusion restaurant. He closed his doors six weeks later, blaming the narrow-mindedness of the locals. It wasn’t the fault of the locals, but the people trying to change them. You can’t sell someone a product they don’t want and don’t understand. If someone else did the concept and it was locally accepted, I’d tell others to follow suite. The town next door has nearly no Hispanic population yet has ten or more Mexican restaurants. No one new is setting a trend, just enjoying the fruits of the labor of the first one.
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Read more at this Gizmodo article from 2014 about the Monte Carlo Fallacy. https://gizmodo.com/the-night-the-gamblers-fallacy-lost-people-millions-1496890660
This is an easy, but time-consuming strategy. You have to comment on other people’s stuff for one hour per day, every day. One hour of time should be spent offering value to people that do not follow you. Go to hashtags on your niche or market and answer people’s questions or comment on things posters say. This gets them interested in you. This is a long and tedious process and an hour feels like it takes forever. 
Use alt text! It’s free and helps increase engagement because Instagram “likes” the use of alt text. Instagram’s artificial intelligence uses the alt text to find out what the picture is about so you don’t write your caption in the alt text spot, you write a description of your photo and Instagram likes to push out what it can understand. It’s under the “advanced settings” area of your post. You will find the textbook to type it in to and remember to be keyword heavy in a verbose description of your image. This isn’t paraphrasing, but an entirely new description.
Remember how I said to use your notepad on your phone to wrote your post? This is part of that. Put your hashtags at the bottom of your post. No one needs to directly see them because Instagram gets the keywords in front of the right audience for you.
Using portrait-proportioned images makes your post look bigger because it takes up more real estate on the screen when viewed by the user. It takes up nearly the entire screen and that’s all the users sees for that moment. Obviously you need an engaging photo, but this reduces the competition for the user’s attention to zero if the user can’t see anything else on the screen but your image.
Make sure you tag everything that’s taggable. If you are in Las Vegas and take a picture in front of the Volcano Show at the Mirage, both the Mirage and the Volcano show have their own accounts so tag both. If friends or celebrities appear in the photos, tag them. If there is a restaurant in the shot on accident but it’s an otherwise good photo, tag that restaurant. Your picture then shows up in the tagged photos section of each of those accounts and guess what, it gets noticed. The primary goal here is to increase engagement and this is just one more way to do it.
Make sure your captions are good quality and engaging. I know that sounds like common sense, but it’s not. Hell, I ignore it frequently for a quick image and a short couple of words just to say where I was and I do mine, largely, as a memory book. I travel for work extensively. In fact, part of the definition of my regular job is travel and I want to be able to look back like old people do in a photo album and remember the time and place I was and I want to just share my experiences through my own eyes. Those posts get the least engagement online. Ironically, when I see my friends in person, those tend to be the posts they mention and ask about, so there is a level of in-person social currency I receive from those posts where I will get asked about it, largely because I didn’t write a lot. The purpose here is to engage with audiences of your brand.
This cannot be stressed enough. Instagram allows up to thirty hashtags. DO NOT use all thirty on every post!!! That is a great way to drop engagement rates. I suggest using no more than fifteen to twenty and on very rare occasion, use all thirty. As an example, I plan to release a book in the next twelve months about my travels. Each state is its own chapter and I am releasing the unedited version as individual blog pieces. I will use the thirty hashtag limit for each state chapter and they will be scheduled in advance, BUT I will also schedule a minimum of two additional posts per day with no more than fifteen hashtags in them. This will keep my total daily average of around twenty and won’t look like I am trying to game the algorithm because Instagram HATES when someone does that.
Wherever you are, check in to the location! Geotag the location. People looking at the location will potentially see your post, which goes from a short time engagement, to being evergreen content. Small and medium sized businesses love reposting positive customer experiences or cool things that happened at the location and those reposts are a great way to get new followers and increased engagement.
Every social media outlet has a best posting time and some accounts will even show when you’ve had the best historic engagement on your posts. These posting times are offset. Let’s say 4PM is the best posting time for Instagram. Do you really want to post when everyone is sitting on the can reading their Instagram? No. You want to post at 3PM so it has time to start showing up in their news feeds. Do not hold me to those exact times. I always have a “best posting time” cheat sheet nearby with the latest data for posting times. These posting times are offset to get you into the time when people are engaging with their social media so you don’t post too late and get overrun by the masses of people online.